“No man, she celebrates Mexican Mother’s Day.”

That’s a quote from a bullshitter to a fellow bullshitter. I didn’t buy it. But first, let me back up.

People like to say the people who change your life are the ones who stick around.

That hasn’t been my experience.

The ones who really move the needle are usually just passing through, headed somewhere else, and you happen to be standing near the door when it opens.

Rafael was one of those.

I was newly divorced. The world had just shut down, and I was trying to figure out who I was without the life I’d spent thirty-one years building. Every part of my life had changed overnight — job, marriage, home, friends, money, routines — and I was completely disoriented. I hadn’t even determined where I was going to live and was trying on different neighborhoods via Airbnb, four or five nights at a time. My first stop was a neighborhood called Orchard Grove, a quaint little section that’s completely isolated due to lack of access on three sides but still very much in the city. It’s near the Heights in Houston. And on the very first night of this journey, I met Rafael.

I met him at a bar called Down the Street. Great name, if you enjoy giving people directions that make you sound like you’re being cagey. If you’re ever in Houston, go. Just don’t ask me for the address out loud. All you need to know is, it’s down the street.

Rafael was nothing like me, which I think is exactly why we got along.

He was thirty-one. A little older than my own kids, which I try not to think about too hard. His parents came from Mexico and didn’t speak much English. He grew up in East Houston, in a world I wasn’t familiar with — though I didn’t have a name for that world yet. That would come later.

He was personable, talkative, and eager to engage. I learned early on that he’d built a couple of successful nightclubs in Houston’s EADO area, and Hurricane Harvey took them out.

He knew everybody and had this Huggy Bear kind of energy — always working an angle, always on the phone with somebody, always five minutes from some new plan that may or may not eventually involve the police.

I’d like to say I noticed something deep and meaningful about him right away. Mostly I noticed he ordered better than I did and somehow got the bartender to comp our second round.

We hit it off immediately.

We were different in every demographic category, and seemed to be the only ones out while everyone else was hunkered down in their bunkers, trying to avoid COVID. Neither one of us seemed to care about COVID, or anything else.

We got together a few times over the next weeks and always had a good time. Good conversations, good stories — we were learning about one another, feeling like we were the only ones still living while everyone else was hiding in their basements. Soon we were hanging out almost daily, enjoying the friendship.

A couple of weeks later, on a Saturday night, my phone rang.

“Hey, Larry. I’m going to see my buddy. In LA. I know you’ve traveled a lot, and I wanted to get your advice on how to do this, because I’ve never traveled.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow.”

Now, I need to back up, because on paper this was just a guy telling me about a road trip. In my head, it was a burning bush.

I’d been praying for a trip. Every divorce book I’d read said the same thing — take a trip, get out of your routine, change your scenery — like healing was a service Expedia offered. COVID had shut all of that down. No trips. Just me, praying about a trip I had no legal way of taking.

So when Rafael said “tomorrow,” something clicked.

Not logic. Not planning. Just certainty, the kind you can’t really explain to people afterward without sounding like you’d been smoking something, which, to be fair, I had.

“Would you mind if I came?”

“Dude. That’s awesome.”

One problem. His “tomorrow” was Mother’s Day.

“Rafael. You can’t leave on Mother’s Day.”

“Nah, man, we do Mexican Mother’s Day. She won’t even notice.”

I didn’t buy it. I have never once in my life met a mother who “won’t even notice.”

I told Rafael, “Dude, she’s been in the US almost forty years. Trust me, she knows Mother’s Day.”

We left Monday instead. His mother, wherever she is, remains welcome.

Sunday night we celebrated the one-day delay by staying up partying until four in the morning, which is the kind of decision only two men with nothing left to lose would make the night before a fourteen-hour drive.

Monday, we left Houston at 3:30 in the afternoon.

That question — “would you mind if I came?” — is going to look, in hindsight, like the single most consequential sentence I said that whole year. At the time it just felt like getting into a truck.

I had no idea where in LA we were headed. All I had was “my buddy.” So I filled in the rest myself — Training Day, basically. Denzel dropping Ethan Hawke off outside some apartment to get “handled” while he went and did business. I built that whole movie in my head, sight unseen, somewhere around the Houston city limits.

Rafael drove. 2006 Toyota 4Runner. A genuinely badass truck, which is a nice way of saying it eventually caught fire.

Somewhere past San Antonio I started smelling something. Plastic. Acrylic. Burning. I figured Rafael knew his own truck and could tell a bad smell from a normal one.

He could not.

We lost a tire. The truck kept smoking. We kept smoking too, cigarette after cigarette, joint after joint, like the truck had inspired us.

It was Planes, Trains and Automobiles, except with more Marlboros and worse Spanish, all of it mine.

We gave up on El Paso and pulled off in a town called Iraan, Texas. I-R-A-A-N. Not the country. I want to be very clear about that, mostly for my own peace of mind, because Rafael drove twenty miles off the freeway to get there and I never once asked why.

We stopped at a Valero station that doubled as a Domino’s Pizza. We got a cold pizza that had probably been sitting there as an extra since lunch, fifteen hours earlier. We also picked up a six-pack of Lone Star beer, which felt about right for where we were emotionally. We were dog-tired and in a massive funk. The trip had been heavy and long and had worn us down physically. But the long stretches of silence wore us down emotionally too. It forced us to lose ourselves in our own thoughts — reflecting on our lives, our own new respective worlds, thinking about how every decision we’d ever made had led us to this one moment. Two strangers, together at 3 a.m. in the middle of West Texas, at a gas station buying a cold pizza and a six-pack of cheap beer.

We checked into one of those old desert-style horseshoe motels — three single-story buildings arranged in a U-shape, bordered on the fourth side by the dusty desert highway. The faded neon sign outside advertised vacancy, air conditioning, and color TV. There was a cement slab in the middle where a pool used to be, an office in the corner with a porch roof providing the only cover in the place, and a single ice machine in the back corner with a rattle so loud and abrasive it was proof the last service call had been during the Reagan administration.

We pulled up to room 15, dropped the pizza and beer, and started ripping the burned-out carpet and what was left of our gear from the back of the 4Runner. It was still hot and smoldering and burned our hands, so we took turns grabbing small pieces at a time, the way a bird comes back for a piece of bread too big to take all at once. We were wiped out. We dug into the pizza box, grabbed a cold slice, opened a warm beer, and went outside to use the wooden rail as a table. We stood on the porch with the door open — cold pizza, warm beer, not talking. Both of us somewhere deep in our own version of the same grief. He’d just gotten divorced too. That was the real bond, underneath all of it — not the truck, not the trip. Two guys, different in every way, whose only common thread was that we’d both recently had our whole lives rearranged.

Then it started raining. Not regular rain. Biblical rain, out of absolutely nowhere.

I looked at Rafael.

“This isn’t an accident. God’s washing the bullshit off us. There’s not going to be a lower point on this whole trip than today. We’re only going up from here.”

Rafael looked back at me.

“I feel it too, man. I feel the energy.”

I still remember the look on his face when he said it. Whether that was God or exhaustion or truck fumes, I couldn’t tell you. But I know it was God. Rafael knew it too. We never needed to say it — we just stood there in silence, watching it rain, eating cold pizza, drinking warm beer.

The next morning: we drove to Fort Stockton to find a new tire and a new exhaust pipe, both shops conveniently across the street from each other. This is where I learned what it costs to be white in Texas.

The tire guy quoted $300 for a used tire. Rafael got out, started yelling at him in Spanish, and there was quite a back-and-forth. Eventually the price dropped to $40.

Muffler guy quoted $600. Same routine. Sixty bucks.

I stood there doing the math on my lifetime white man tax. I’m still not done doing that math. Rafael thought it was hilarious. I thought it was educational. We were both right.

It was the first sign of something I wouldn’t understand for years: Rafael didn’t just know people. He moved between worlds I had no language for — literally — and every time he crossed back over, he brought me a little further in.

Repaired and rolling, we came upon Victorville fourteen hours later. We were about to head down the other side of the LA basin. I saw the sign: Los Angeles, right lane; Beach Cities, left lane. It occurred to me that I’d never actually asked where in LA his friend lived. I had a decision to make in less than two minutes, and Training Day came roaring back — Denzel and the apartment and the whole imagined scene, front and center, right when I needed it least.

In a voice that came out more panicked than I intended, I asked, “What’s the address?”

He gave it to me. I looked it up on my phone. Not East LA. Not LA County, even — Huntington Beach, one block from the pier. High-rent surfer’s mecca, home turf of Hollister clothing, the kind of place that runs a live video feed of the pier in its stores. I could not have been more wrong about where I was going to end up, and I could not have been happier about it.

The buddy’s name was Richard. He was waiting for us at the gate at four in the morning, and the party started before we’d even parked — a far cry from the cartel guys in wife-beaters I’d built in my head on the drive out. Turned out he sold industrial compressors for a living, did well enough at it to be renting a mid-rise condo probably running him five or six grand a month. Cool as hell, and nothing like the guy I’d imagined.

It carried on for four more days — coincidences, people, nights that had no business working out as well as they did. One story sums up the whole stretch.

Day two, I fell asleep on Richard’s patio and woke up locked out — the sliding door wouldn’t budge, and nobody answered when I banged on it. They’d gone surfing without me. The whole building was glass, balcony rail included, and another building fifty feet away had the exact same setup. I was on display with nowhere to hide.

I texted Richard for help and got roasted by a total stranger — turned out I had the wrong Richard saved in my phone, and he had no idea what my problem even was. Eventually I had to pee, so I found a few empty beer cans, hunkered into the corner, and made it work.

An hour later they came back and found me waiting at the door like a dog waiting on its owner. That night, on the rooftop, I told the story to a table of strangers — and of all the people who could have been sitting there, two of them turned out to live in the building directly across from mine, at exactly the wrong angle. They’d seen the whole thing. Turned out I’d had the wrong worry the entire time: I’d spent that hour terrified they’d catch me peeing, and it never once occurred to me they’d assume I was relieving myself another way. We got a big laugh out of that but I was never convinced they believed my version.

Five days total. I’ve been to forty-five countries and probably four times that many cities.

That trip still wins.

Here’s the part I didn’t understand until years later.

Rafael didn’t hand me a friendship that lasted. We drifted, the way people do once one of you goes back to work and the other one still hasn’t figured out what work even means anymore.

What he handed me was a door.

Everything on the other side of that door — the people, the places, the version of Houston that doesn’t show up on anybody’s HOA newsletter — I finally had a name for it. I started calling it the Jungle. Rafael didn’t build the Jungle. He just happened to be standing at the entrance with a truck on fire, saying, “You coming or not?”

Some people stick around for a chapter.

Some people just open one, then wander off to go fix somebody else’s tire.

Rafael was the second kind. And the trip he never knew he was giving me is still, all these years later, the best one I’ve ever taken.